Archive for November 20, 2012

How much do you value your privacy? How much privacy can we expect to have in the modern age of GPS enabled smartphones, WiFi, and search engine companies like Google releasing ISP records to the government on a regular basis?

These unsettling questions come to mind as I watch our military and intelligence community prove just how un-intelligent they can be regarding their own privacy and the government’s want for ever more information about our personal lives. The implications are staggering.

“If the director of central intelligence isn’t able to successfully keep his emails private, what chance do I have?” said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-liberties advocacy group.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, as if they don’t have enough power to spy on the public, Senator Reid and the Democrat controlled Senate have flipped a privacy bill into a spy-on-the-public bill.

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans’ e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.

Leahy’s rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — to access Americans’ e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge.

It’s an abrupt departure from Leahy’s earlier approach, which required police to obtain a search warrant backed by probable cause before they could read the contents of e-mail or other communications.

This is, of course, an example of the government going too far for security. And you know the old saying so often attributed to Ben Franklin, “Those who would trade in their freedom for their protection deserve neither.”

Also, I can’t stress more, here, that is the Democrats doing this. This is not a GOP effort.

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